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12
An enormous difference in the mortality of the various parts of St. Giles's, is
shown in the figures of the foregoing table, and the results are more absolute and
valuable than those derived from the sub-districts of the Registrar Genera), as the divisions
are less artificial and compound in their characters. Making all allowance for the
different proportion of children living in each locality as in some measure accounting
for variations in the death-rate, still the existence of a vast mass of preventible disease
is established beyond dispute. If in large portions of the district only 14, 1G, or 18
persons in the 1000 die annually, how can a mortality of 28, 30, or 35 in the 1000
be regarded as inevitable in other localities ?
Evidence of the preventible character of the disease which kills the population
of St. Giles's will be found also in a comparison of the columns for 1857 and 1858.
A few only of the most rudimentary propositions of sanitary science are yet known to
us. Some of these have been acted on in 1856 and 1857. In these years, measures
of cleanliness and drainage were effected in many parts of the district, but most
systematically and extensively in the localities which I have marked F, G, and II, on
the diagram, and on the foregoing table. In each of these divisions, the year 1858
discovers a notable diminution of mortality.
Let us be wary of assigning the whole of such improvement to sanitary
measures; much will be attributable to circumstances which we can at present only call
accident, fluctuations from year to year, and of these the changed position of Lincoln's
Inn Fields is an example.* Much again may have to be explained away by other
considerations, which will appear in their due place. But after every deduction,
looking at the broad facts in the two columns for 1857 and 1858, remembering the
greater unhealthiness of the town at large in the later year, we shall observe a fall in
the mortality of St. Giles's, just in those very districts where the most active sanitary
measures were taken—a fall of no trifling extent, but 2, 6, 10, in the thousand—other
localities the while following, with hardly an exception, the rule of the town at large,
and being either without improvement, or having actually deteriorated. Without
venturing on a numerical estimation of the lives that have been saved by the vigilance
of the local government, we cannot reasonably doubt that some portion of the improvement
that we witness in the rate of mortality of St. Giles's, is to be ascribed to the
removal of unhealthy conditions from the district. We are further warranted in this
belief by the fact before stated, that it is the class of zymotic complaints which has been
less fatal than usual to St. Giles's in 1858, these diseases being of all others the most
dependent on unhealthy conditions within our controul. And stronger corroborative
evidence still of the real influence of our sanitary measures will be presently afforded
by a comparison of the localization of these zymotic diseases, in 1857 and 1858.
The mortality among children which prevails in St. Giles's, beyond other
parts of London, requires in this report, as in my last, to be closely scrutinized. A
knowledge of the spots where this infantile mortality is greatest, gives no inconsiderable
due to its cause. I have therefore ascertained, in the ten sub-divisions of our district,
the mortality of children under two, and under five years of age, and I have examined
* Lincoln's Inn Fields locality has the smallest population of all the ten, and hence,
small variations in the numbers of deaths registered, are apt to assume undue importance.